The Chains We Forge
Partisanship strives to make Liberty its b!tch
“The alternate domination of one faction over another, sharpened by the spirit of revenge natural to party dissention, … is itself a frightful despotism.”
George Washington
If you ask people whether they like politics, chances are many of them will say no. What they are likely reacting to, however, is their dislike for partisanship rather than politics. This is because humans are innately political. Being political isn’t something we like or dislike, necessarily. It is something we simply do as we interact with other people.
Consider a situation where a number of friends decide they want to go out together to get something to eat. The first decision is what to eat and where to go to get it. A few of the group might be vegan, and others may have other special dietary restrictions. Add to that the fact that some of the group members are particularly finicky and don’t like many exotic foods. In this scenario, the obvious discussion then centers on how the group can accommodate all of these different wants and needs in order to achieve a uniform goal - getting something everyone can eat together. It is the uniform goal that defines the cohesion of the group and its ability to come to an acceptable decision.
This situation can get complicated, however, if the vegans in the group decide that they can’t go to somewhere that serves meat for moral reasons or if some members of the group don’t like one restaurant or another for reasons unrelated to their food offerings. Things can get even murkier if some members of the group are also members of certain organizations that support certain restaurants and not others. All of a sudden, additional ancillary considerations start to impede on the importance of the uniform goal.
While this example is somewhat banal, it is at its core a political situation. Politics is simply how we organize ourselves as humans in a society in order to structure our society and provide for cooperation towards a uniform goal. Partisanship arises when differences of opinion or perspective start to sort people into like and unalike qualities. When enough of these qualities are defined, a political bloc is formed. When this bloc becomes more established and well-defined, a political party is born.
From the beginning, America’s founding fathers were well aware of the dangers of political partisanship. The quote at the beginning of this article was taken from George Washington’s farewell address where he warned Americans against taking on an “us vs. them” mentality. Already, the early leaders themselves had fallen into the two political camps of Federalists and Democratic-Republicans. The primary difference between the two was that the Federalists advocated for a strong central government whereas the Democratic-Republicans wanted more regional and state control of affairs with less direction from or control by the federal government. This central debate continues to this day to be a foundational difference of political perspectives in America.
The wide differences of education and class also played a key role in this initial alignment of what would become a two-party political system. The Federalists primarily represented the wealthier, more educated industrialists while the Democratc-Republicans were made up more of the agrarian, rural citizenry. It is important to remember that this was during a time when many countries were experiencing a groundswell of new political power shifting from the old structures of nobility to common citizens. It is not surprising, then, that this class difference would become embedded into the political fabric of the new nation.
Although wary of the dangers of political parties, many of the founders also saw them as inevitable. James Madison famously said “Liberty is to faction what air is to fire.” If people are free to fully decide things for themselves, it would be inevitable that differing opinions would cause them to coalesce into like-minded groups. He also warned, however, that using this as a reason for abolishing or limiting liberty would be as foolish as trying to do away with air because of the danger of fire.
Today, the dangers of partisanship are as true as ever. If the uniform goal of America is to be one country with a united society, then partisanship is the primary obstacle to that goal. This is because the ultimate ends of partisanship is to divide everyone into us and them. This can only be achieved by instituting something that is both a core foundation of partisanship and an immediate detriment to liberty. That something is loyalty.
Party loyalty is at the heart of political partisanship. Political parties cannot reasonably function without it. The irony here is that if liberty necessarily spawns partisanship, partisanship then effectively squelches liberty. Thomas Jefferson warned about this when he called the submission of one’s opinions to a party creed the "last degradation of a free and moral agent." He believed that making the country “one people” was the most important thing one could do for the country and warned people not to allow political differences to mar our social relationships. Perhaps this is why Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, fierce opponents in their political lives, became such close friends and pen pals later in life.
“The greatest good we can do our country is to heal its party divisions, and make them one people.”
~ Thomas Jefferson
Today, that task seems harder than ever. There is a perception that the political rhetoric has crossed the Rubicon beyond any possibility of healing the wounds. One can argue who is primarily responsible for escalating things to this point of no return, but once this type of line is crossed, it scarcely matters who crossed it first. Understanding how one got to a place may be important, particularly in preventing such a journey in the future, but it is much less important to figuring out where to go from here.
Turning to the political parties to solve this type of problem does not seem to be the right place to look for answers. If partisanship is what got us into this situation, it is not likely to be the way out. In fact, it is the key factor which gives a party its strength that prevents it from solving the issue of division. Once again, the problem is party loyalty. Loyalty is essentially a form of coercion. At its core, it is intolerant of dissention. This is why it is contrary to liberty and freedom.
It is up to all Americans to determine what our uniform goal is as a country. As children, many of us were taught that the original uniform goal was to unite a people not based on any religious, ethnic, territorial, or ideological creed under the unifying ideal of liberty. If that is what we still choose as our uniform goal, then there has to be something that supersedes partisan loyalty. Liberty would seem a good place to start.